Tea Party is planning a 'Day of Resistance' on Feb. 23

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20. Oh bloody hell -- they're involved with Dan Backer

I've posted about Dan Backer here a few times. He's a lawyer who's set up a number of conservative PACS that target Tea Partiers for donations while spending very little on actual conservative candidates. He's also been involved with a couple of Supreme Court cases seeking to loosen campaign finance restrictions.

One of those cases, which was successful, resulted in the creation of the so-called "hybrid" PAC, of which WRPAC is an example. And I see that WRPAC was also involved in requesting an FEC advisory opinion which would have allowed them to skirt normal reporting requirements for their Facebook ads on behalf of candidates. (http://www.fec.gov/pages/fecrecord/2012/march/ao2011-28.shtml)

I also found this -- http://saos.nictusa.com/aodocs/1191456.pdf -- which indicates that Backer represented WRPAC in that FEC request.

The short version is that Backer is bad news wherever he turns up. Almost everything he's been involved in is a scam of one sort or another. And the OpenSecrets report on WRPAC -- which shows them spending almost a million dollars in the 2012 election cycle but donating only $68,500 to federal candidates -- suggests this could be more of the same. (http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00461772)

Here's the link to their monthly FEC filings -- http://images.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00461772. I've just spent a little time glancing through their last two yearly summaries -- and it does seem they spend more on payroll, travel, and fundraising than on anything else.